The iPad was supposed to kill the PC. What happened?

It’s rare to see a new piece of technology – even one bearing the hallowed Apple logo – to achieve mass popularity as quickly as the iPad did after it was released almost six years ago.

In the first year after the tablet computer was unveiled, Apple sold 19m of them, and after two years it had sold 67m. In comparison the iPhone’s early sales stood at 5m in year one and 21m in its first 24 months.

The instant success led Steve Jobs to predict the arrival of the “post-PC era” in 2010, likening the decline of the desktop and laptop computer at the hands of tablets and smartphones to the urbanisation of modern America, in which the move to cities meant falling sales of trucks and the growing popularity of smaller cars.

In one way, Jobs was right. After peaking in 2011, sales of personal computers have declined significantly, from 364m to 276m last year; a quarter of the market disappeared in four years. The downturn has been tempestuous for the world’s PC makers – Dell has gone private and switched its focus away from the once-lucrative market, while HP has split itself in two to protect its profitable software division from the downturn in spending on its hardware. Computing has moved towards touchscreen devices, precipitating massive changes for things such as online shopping and how we watch TV.

For a while, it also appeared that the other part of Jobs’ prediction – that the tablet would fill the void – would come true too. The constant appearance of iPads on television and in the hands of celebrities, as well as the release of a smaller iPad Mini that further broadened its appeal, helped to propel its sales further: they reached 74m in 2013.

But since then, the iPad has stuttered. Their sales have fallen on a year-by-year basis for eight consecutive quarters. In Apple’s most-recent Christmas period – the company’s most important quarter – iPad sales were their lowest for four years. In fact, Apple’s Mac division brought in more revenue than the iPad last year – hardly an indicator of a post-PC era.

Tim Cook showing off the iPad ProCredit:
EPA

It isn’t just Apple: sales of all tablets fell 10pc last year and were about 70m short of Cook’s prediction two years earlier that they would surpass those of PCs in 2015. The iPad is hardly a struggling enterprise: sales were worth $23bn (£16bn) in 2015 – more than the entire revenue of Facebook – but hardly what Apple’s executives might have hoped for a few years ago.

So what happened? One thing that can be blamed for declining iPad sales is the rise of the “phablet” – bigger smartphones with bigger screens that fulfil many of the functions of the tablet itself like reading ebooks and watching videos. Apple itself has begun making supersized iPhones with screens approaching tablet territory, and Tim Cook admitted last year that this had begun to cannibalise iPad sales.

At the same time, there has been little reason for current iPad owners to upgrade. While the iPhone has consistently added new features and improvements, leading millions to buy a new one every two years like clockwork, the main changes to its bigger cousin in recent years have been marginal speed improvements and cosmetic tweaks.

Many tablet owners tend to use them only for browsing videos and photos and for light internet use, and find older models are perfectly capable, while iPads have not tended to have the raw power and breadth of applications that PCs still enjoy.

Apple is now trying to change that. Last year, it unveiled a new iPad with a detachable keyboard, bigger screen and beefed up credentials at targeted squarely at the PC power user. It represented the biggest change to the device in three years. In November, Cook told this newspaper that the iPad Pro would be “a replacement for a notebook or a desktop for many, many people”. “They will start using it and conclude they no longer need to use anything else, other than their phones,” he said. “Why would you buy a PC anymore?”

In the iPad Pro’s first three months analysts believe it outsold the Surface, Microsoft’s own tablet-laptop hybrid, although this still represents a slow start by Apple standards and reviewers have questioned whether it is truly capable of replacing the PC.

It’s too early to say if the iPad will recover, but Apple is showing no signs on giving up of Jobs’ prediction of a post-PC era a reality.

Incidentally, the meteoric rise of the iPad followed by its subsequent decline over the last couple of years shows the danger of making predictions about the future of new product categories as they first go on sale. The Apple Watch, released last year, has so far had little impact on the company’s bottom line, but the iPhone – now the world’s most profitable product – was a slow burner too. We should be wary of writing it off as well.